Latour’s purchase of Eisele ‘came out of the blue’

Bart and Daphne Araujo sit at their Eisele vineyard near Calistoga. (Photo: Lianne Milton/Special to The Chronicle, 2010)

An offer from the owners of Bordeaux’s Chateau Latour to buy Napa’s famed Eisele Vineyard and the Araujo Estate winery, “came out of the blue,” owner Bart Araujo said in an interview Friday.

Araujo said he and his wife Daphne, who purchased Eisele in 1990, had no plans to sell when they received an unsolicited offer from the family of French billionaire Francois Pinault. But it provided a perfect solution to the matter of who would continue to care for one of California’s most historic vineyard sites.

“I guess my short note would be: perfect buyer, wrong time,” Araujo said. “We’ve never really felt that we were owners of this property. We felt that … steward is overused these days, but we felt we had the privilege and opportunity to live and work here. And at some point we figured we’d pass the baton to the next responsible steward.”

That process began several months ago with an inquiry from Latour and its president, Frederic Engerer, who the Araujos felt they should speak with “out of respect” about the possibility of acquiring the 162-acre Calistoga property, with its 38 acres of vineyard. The opportunity for Latour to be the one to grab that baton proved too good to pass up.

“Chateau Latour is my benchmark wine, and it has been even before we started Araujo Estate,” Araujo said.

Engerer was in Napa this week meeting with employees, Araujo said, and Pinault was flying in Friday from France to do the same. Pinault’s Artemis Group owns not just Latour but several other wine properties, including the Rhone’s Chateau-Grillet, and has holdings in such companies as Christie’s auction house and Gucci.

The sale includes the Eisele property and winery, plus the Araujo brand and inventory. All of Araujo’s U.S. employees are set to remain.

Eisele was known for the quality of its grapes as far back as the 19th century, and made some of the top Cabernets of the 1970s and ‘80s. The Araujos built upon that legacy with an extensive round of replanting; their Eisele wines became the rare Cabernets to retain a distinct sense of place amid Napa’s cult-era tendencies toward excess.

First-growth Latour, whose top-rank status was evident even before Bordeaux’s 1855 classification, would have been an impressive buyer in any case.

But Araujo said he was taken not only with the chateau’s forward-thinking approach to the market — Latour created a fracas last year with an announcement that it would abandon Bordeaux’s en-primeur system of selling wine futures, and instead would hold its wines for several years longer than most competitors — but also by its avant-garde views of farming, a relative rarity in stodgy Bordeaux.

That is no small statement coming from Araujo, whose dedication to farming Eisele has been extraordinary even by Napa standards — not only biodynamic practices but also a meticulous approach to such details as cover crops and biodiversity.

“I quite frankly was amazed and surprised to find out they’re practicing biodynamics at Latour,” Araujo said, “and in fact they’ve gone one more than us. They have draft horses. So in fact we’re behind their curve.”

The Araujos will remain at Eisele until January, but they are already scouting properties throughout Napa Valley — “class A or class A-plus vineyard land” — to launch a new wine project in conjunction with their longtime winemaker Francoise Peschon, who has overseen Araujo Estate’s cellar work since 1993.

“Napa Valley is our home. We’re staying here,” said Araujo, who sold his Southern California construction company in 1992 to focus on wine. “We’re looking to basically grow grapes, make a little wine. Probably on a little smaller scale but the same level of quality and commitment.”